by Caitlin Mallen
Over the summer, the University of Florida (UF) College of Education offered a history course titled “History of Education in the U.S.” that required students to create a positionality statement on their “personal and educational experiences.”
The statement was worth 10% of students’ grades, The New Guard reported.
The course “explores how issues of race, class, gender, exceptionality, sexual identity, language, geography, and religion have historically impacted U.S. education,” the class syllabus explains.
Carolyn Silva, a Ph.D. candidate and teacher of the course, focused primarily on “the development of schooling and educational practices in the land that became the United States and the interaction between educational practices and the larger cultural, social, economic, and political context.”
The New Guard reported:
Encouraging students to “promote antiracist education,” Silva included resources that can “uplift” black communities. One of these resources included a link to a fundraiser for Black Lives Matter criminals.
Promoting bail funds for criminals does not “uplift” the black community. Releasing criminals back into neighborhoods across the country endangers peoples’ safety and does nothing to “uplift black humanity.”
One of the assignments suggested students write their final essay on topics such as the Black Panther Party or the socialist political gang called the Young Lords.
“I was shocked to find out that the class that was supposed to be about the history of the education system was more focused on telling me how different minority communities have been oppressed by our government,” a student told YAF.
The class comes on the heels of Florida’s newly-enacted House Bill 7, which took effect July 1 and prohibits the teaching of any content in Florida that “espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels such individual to believe specified concepts constitutes discrimination based on race, color, sex, or national origin.”
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Caitlin Mallen is a Hawaii Campus Correspondent with Campus Reform. She is a junior at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and majors in animation and minors in history.
Photo “University of Florida” by University of Florida.
